The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only c...ircumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Sexual activity, for women, has a history of vulnerability, in a way it simply does not have for men. The mother has to teach this... hidden text to her daughter. The mother's warnings, her attempts to halt sexual development in her daughter, are not so much signs of disapproval or envy, but of fear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set... so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devo...te more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having "too much" sex. At what point does a "healthy" amount bec...ome "too much"? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such.... When "morality" is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions ... but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Children's bodies aren't like automobiles with the assailant's fingerprints lingering on the wheel. The world of sexual abuse is q...uintessentially secret. It is the perfect crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A commitment to sexual equality with males ... is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the... raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

"Lesbianism" would appear to be so little a threat at the moment that it is hardly ever mentioned.... Whatever its potentiality in... sexual politics, female homosexuality is currently so dead an issue that while male homosexuality gains a grudging tolerance, in women the event is observed in scorn or in silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »